From this "plaza" our travellers drove to the conflux of the rivers Darro and Xenil, which together form the Guadalquiver; and from thence proceeded to a mosque, where a tablet records the fact of its having been the place where the unfortunate king Boabdil gave the keys of the town to the Christian conquerors, Ferdinand and Isabella, and then himself rode slowly and sadly away from his beautiful palace by a mountain still called the "Last Sigh of the Moor," immortalized both in verse and song. The accompanying ballad, with its plaintive wailing sound, still echoes in the hearts and on the lips of the people:
Ay de mi Alhama
Paseabase el Rey Moro
Por la ciudad de Granada
Desde la puerta de Elvira
Hasta la de Bibarrambla
Ay de mi Alhama!
Returning, they visited the church of Las Angustias, where there is a wonderful but tawdrily dressed image of the Blessed Virgin, who is the patroness of the town. The French sisters of charity have a large orphanage and day-school here, established originally by Madame Calderon; but the situation, in the street called Recogidas, is low and damp, and their chapel being almost underground, and into which no sun can ever enter, seriously affects the health of the sisters. Here, as everywhere, they are universally beloved and respected, and the present superior is one eminently qualified, by her loving gentleness and evenness of temper, to win the hearts of all around her. The dress of the people of Granada is singularly picturesque: the women wear crape shawls of the brightest colors, yellow, orange, or red, with flowers stuck jauntily on one side of the head just above the ear; the men have short velvet jackets, waistcoats with beautiful hanging silver buttons (which have descended from father to son, and are not to be bought except by chance), hats with large borders, turned up at the edge, red sashes round the waist, and gaiters of untanned leather, daintily embroidered, open at the knee, with hanging strips of leather and silver buttons. Over the whole, in cold weather, is thrown the "capa," or large cloak, which often conceals the threadbare garments of a beggar, but which is worn with the air of the proudest Spanish 'hidalgo.' This evening, the last which our travellers were to spend in Granada, they had a visit from the king and captain of the gypsies, a very remarkable man, between thirty and forty years of age, and a blacksmith by trade. He brought his guitar, and played in the most marvellous and beautiful way possible: first tenderly and softly; then bursting into the wildest exultation; then again plaintive and wailing, ending with a strain of triumph and rejoicing and victory which completely entranced his hearers. It was like a beautiful poem or a love-tale, told with a pathos indescribable. It was a fitting last remembrance of a place so full of poetry and of the past, with a tinge in it of that sorrowful dark thread which always seems woven into the tissue of earthly lives. Sorrowfully, the next morning, our travellers paid their last visit to the matchless Alhambra, which had grown upon them at every turn. Then came the "good-by" to their good and faithful guide, Bensaken, that name so well known to all Granada tourists; and to the kind sisters of charity, whose white "cornettes" stood grouped round the fatal diligence which was to convey them back to Malaga. And so they bade adieu to this beautiful city, with many a hope of a return on some future day, and with a whole train of new thoughts and new pictures in their mind's eye, called forth by the wonders they had seen.
Original.
Victor Cousin And His Philosophy.
The papers some months since announced the death at Paris of M. Victor Cousin, the well-known eclectic philosopher and Orleanist statesman. The reëstablishment of the Imperial régime in France had deprived him of his political career, never much distinguished; and whatever interest he may have continued to take in philosophy, he produced, as far as we are aware, no new philosophical work after the revolution of July, 1830, except prefaces to new editions of his previous writings, or to other writers whose works he edited, and some "Rapports" to the Academy, among which the most notable is that on the unpublished works of Abelard, preceded by a valuable introduction on the scholastic philosophy, which he afterward published in a separate volume under the title of La Philosophie Scholastique.
M. Cousin was born at Paris in 1792, and was, the New American Cyclopedia says, the son of a clock maker, a great admirer of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and he was, of course, brought up without any religious faith or culture, as were no small portion of the youth of France born during the Revolution. Pierre Leroux maliciously accuses Cousin, after he had quarreled with him, of having been, when they were fellow-students together, a great admirer of L'Ami du Peuple, the journal in which Marat gained his infamous notoriety. His early destination was literature, and he was always the littérateur rather than the philosopher; but early falling under the influence of M. Royer-Collard, a stanch disciple of the Scottish school, founded by Reid and closed by Sir William Hamilton, he directed his attention to the study of philosophy, became master of conferences in the Normal School, and, while yet very young, professor of the history of philosophy in the Faculté des Lettres at Paris. His course for 1818, and a part of is course for 1819 and 1820, have been published from notes taken by his pupils. Being too liberal to suit the government, he was suspended from his professorship in 1824, but was restored in 1828, and continued his lectures up to the Revolution of 1830. Since then he has made no important contributions to philosophical science.
The greater part of M. Cousin's philosophical works are left as fragments or as unfinished courses. His course of 1829-30 ends with the sensist school, and the critical examination of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. His translation of Plato was completed indeed; but the arguments or introductions, except to a few of the Dialogues, and the Life of Plato promised, have never appeared. He seems to have exhausted his philosophical forces at an early day, and after publishing a new and revised edition of his previous writings, to have devoted himself chiefly to literature, especially to the literary history of the first half of the seventeenth century, and the biography of certain eminent ladies that played a very distinguished part in the political intrigues and insurrections of the period. It is doubtful if any man living had so thorough and minute a knowledge of the literature, the religious controversies, the philosophy, the polities, and the biography of the period from the accession of Louis XIII. to the end of the wars of the Fronde, and the triumph of Mazarin over his enemies, as he possessed. His Duchesse de Longueville, Madame de Sablé, Duchesse de Chevreuse, and Madame de Hautefort, and his history of the conclusion of the wars of the Fronde, are, as literary works, unrivalled, written with rare simplicity, purity, grace, and delicacy of expression and style, and have an easy natural eloquence and charm never surpassed by any writer even in the French language. He has resuscitated those great dames of the seventeenth century, who live, love, sin, repent, and do penance in his pages as they did in real life. He seems, as a Parisian has said, to have really fallen in love with them, and to have regarded each of them as his mistress, whose honor be must defend at the risk of his life.
The French, we believe, usually count M. Villemain as the most perfect master of their beautiful language; but to our taste he was surpassed by Cousin, if not in the delicacy of phrase, which only a Frenchman born or bred can appreciate, in all the higher qualities of style, as much as he was in depth and richness of feeling, and variety and comprehensiveness of thought. Cousin was by far the greater man, endowed with the richer genius, and, as far as we can judge, equally polished and graceful as a writer. As a philosophical writer, for beauty, grace, elegance, and eloquence he has had no equal since Plato; and he wrote on philosophical subjects with ease and grace, charmed and interested his readers in the dryest and most abstruse speculations of metaphysics. His rhetoric was captivating even if his philosophy was faulty.